In Casablanca, everybody went to Rick's. In Tbilisi, they go to Betsy's Place.

On a narrow, steep and crumbling side street of the once raffish and now mostly ravaged capital of Georgia, there is a small hotel. Diplomats, World Bank analysts and consultants stay there. Le tout Tbilisi and visiting jet-setters drop in for dinner. .....
The proprietor of the elegant Betsy's Place is in her own way as improbable an expatriate as the one played by Humphrey Bogart. Betsy is actually Elizabeth Haskell, an exquisitely dressed, impeccably coiffed former Baltimore debutante in her late 50's who most days looks as if she just stepped out of a garden club meeting in Georgetown. ....More (from New York Times, July 5, 1997)

"Ambassador Yalowitz, Governor, ladies and gentlemen.....
when I came into this center today I smelled a smell I have
never before smelled in Georgia--new paint. This Women and
Children's center is blessed by having the support of the
government of Kutaisi and the US, working with AIHA,
all of whom have participated in establishing it.
Life has priorities, and one must choose
them. It is often useful to see what God has chosen for his
priorities, in deciding those for one's own life. God has made
it clear that reproduction--survival of the species--is amongst
his highest priorities. One has only to look around at the myriad
of wonderful ways in which reproduction occurs in nature to
see that God must have spent six out of the seven days of
creation thinking about reproduction." More

To a meeting at the Metechi Hotel called by US AID to discuss ideas for funding the next three years..... The question was: if you had only one thing to do for Georgia, what would it be? The answers were predictable: the rule of law; human rights; education; macroeconomics. I said there was an old house with a well a few hundred yards away. Near the bottom of the well was a tunnel that reached a small room under the house. In the room, during the early 1900s, was a hand-operated printing press upon which the communists had printed the propaganda supporting the revolution I asked: what would the communists in 1900 have said in answer to the question 'what do you want?' The answer: a printing press and paper. My answer to the question now was simple: electricity. With electricity one can heat homes, feed hungry bellies, teach children, print informative materials about the rule of law and macroeconomics, provide working hospitals, etc......More

This is my fifteenth trip to Tbilisi. I approach them now with as much enthusiasm and pleasurable anticipation tinged with a hint of mystery as I did with the first one in August, 1992. My two planets now are Atlanta and Tbilisi. I use the word 'planet' advisedly, because they are so different. As a youngster of ten or so my favorite book was The Red Planet by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote several science fiction books, in addition to his multiple Tarzan books. If I remember correctly, the hero was John Carter. One night as he was gazing at Mars (= red planet) something happened and he was forthwith transported there. The books are about his adventures on Mars, and I remember even now my fantasies of having another planet I could go to. The Republic of Georgia is exactly that to me, a few years beyond age ten. More

At breakfast at Betsy's met Mike Calhoun, who is here for a couple of months and doing something about agriculture. Probably fifties, avuncular sort. The kind of treasure one encounters at the table in Betsy's Hotel. He told me in Eastern Georgia, near the coast and up in the mountains, there is a town Tchalka. A huge bowl of 50,000 acres with black, rich soil that is fluffy--like butter. Home of the Tchalka potato. The villages are perched around the periphery, so as not to waste any of the precious soil .....He said Georgia's latitude is the same as the middle of Iowa, somewhere around 42 degrees...... This present time--December--is the 'rain of the latter days' in the Bible--viz., the increase in rain that comes at the end of the year.....In Soviet times there were two million acres of wheat cultivated in Georgia. Mike says Georgia has the most agricultural potential of any place he has seen outside the United States.....More

Levan came and we had a 7 a.m. Turkish bath. I was rubbed painfully by a sponge of sorts ('mekise') that scraped off the first layer of the epidermis. I quote from Alexander Dumas' visit to the Turkish baths of Tbilisi in the last century:

'.....we followed our guide to the private rooms beyond. The first was
a vestibule with three benches, where we undressed and were each
given a small towel. Then we went to the second room. I confess I had
to come straight out again, for I thought my lungs would burst in that hot, steamy air, but after standing in the doorway for a while I grew
more accustomed to it and managed to go inside. The stark simplicity of that inner room was almost biblical. It was all of bare stone and contained three stone troughs full of water so hot that at first I could not even put my finger in the coolest of them.'
Alexander Dumas, Travels in Caucasia, translated by A.E. Murch

To the Children's Hospital to consult on a patient. I have remarked before how this is inevitable each visit, and so difficult. The patients are usually extremely ill, and the diagnostic data is not present......This was a 17 year old law student who had been found comatose in his bedroom by his parents at 9 a.m., after they had a normal evening with him the night before, seeing him last at midnight. He lived with them. Taken to a hospital, where aspiration pneumonia had been diagnosed, and his lungs washed out with some unknown and probably ungodly chemical. This is a frequent practice amongst Soviet Union emergency medicine physicians. He was then brought to the Children's Hospital and placed in intensive care. More

I got a shoeshine from a sidewalk vendor..... I have a thing about shoe shines. I am constantly on the lookout for masters of the profession. The man today I rank amongst the three best. Oscar was the first. When I was in the Vietnam war I lived in a compound in Angeles City, near Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Four of us rented a house, complete with two live-in maids and Oscar, the house boy. We paid $100 a month for everything. I would get up at 5:30 a.m. to find fresh bread procured that morning from the bakery man who made a daily 4 a.m. circuit. Home in the afternoon and Scotch with ice waiting. The best quality Scotch, at $2.15 a fifth. And Oscar. Every night I put out my shoes and opened my bedroom door the next morning to be blinded by the shoes. More

On the way to Gori we passed by y.......momWame, a castle the Georgians defended against the Persians in the fourteenth century or so. The name is an obscenity..... The tale is the Persians surrounded the castle, thinking to drive the Georgians out by cutting off their water and food supplies. Unbeknownst to the Persians, there was a tunnel which ran some distance to a river, so the Georgians had no problems with water or food. Each day at sundown, the Georgians would go to the parapets of the castle and shout y.....momWame! which is a command to perform a certain obscene act. ......Ksani is the official name. More

Opening of the National Information Learning Centre

"President Shevardnadze, Minister Jorbenadze, Ambassador Courtney, ladies and gentlemen. These few rooms in this old building began as a dream three years ago. .....The capital of the new age we are entering is information. Information is to our age what gold, diamonds and oil were to previous generations. Georgia is uniquely suited to take full advantage of this new wealth. Georgians are highly intelligent and intensely motivated. The creation of Gelati by King David is a testament to their respect and love of education....... Today we stand in a few rooms in an old building. But these few rooms in this old building contain something more precious than all the gold and silver and jewels of Aladdin. They contain the open sesame to the world of information." More

I got off the plane in Moscow, returning home from Tbilisi. Raining. Dreary. Cold. Sheremetyevo-1 airport. Dirty, old, uninviting. I waited patiently in line for customs. The woman looked at length at my papers, then called a guard. They gestured at my visa. A smattering of English. I rapidly got the message I was being put on a bus to Sheremetyevo-2 and was to be deported to the U.S. on the next flight. They kept pointing to my Russian visa. They sat me down and went, I could tell, to make arrangements for my immediate departure from the airport, without picking up luggage, without even being allowed to see my friend who was waiting for me outside. I gestured, plead, did everything I could.....More

A visit to the National Medical Library. The visit carved images in my brain that are probably ineradicable. First of all, over one million books. Secondly, they are on the floors, on staircases, piled high on desks, windows, every conceivable place. Thirdly, they all look to have been printed around the time of Gutenberg. I took a picture of the chief financial officer sitting with her abacus. I will send this to the National Library of Medicine......More

After breakfast we went down into Tbilisi. There was a flat tire, and I told Irina and Shio about my father's recollection of when he was an eighteen-year-old young man growing up on the farm, and spending his weekends in the small town of Washington, Ga. That was around 1915, when cars were just becoming popular, and his family had one. The inner tubes were balloon tubes, and were always getting a puncture and going flat. My father said he and his brothers spent their weekends
"fighting, making love (different word--onomatopoeia), and fixing flats"! This is very true in Georgia nowadays. One doesn't go a mile without seeing some poor soul struggling with a flat tire. More

I awakened to snow and a penetrating cold. When I was here in February my feet suffered the most, so this time I brought fleece-lined boots, thin socks to put on followed by thick ones. My feet stayed warm all day, and I discovered if they stay warm so does the rest of me. When I dressed for the day I carefully took a small pocket flashlight with me: a necessity when one goes to a completely dark bathroom without electricity. More

The hospital was only a few miles from the border. There were bullet holes everywhere, and I was told the hospital had been terrorized repeatedly. The minister of health and I visited most of the patients. I saw an old man whose leg clearly had osteomyelitis, and who had been there two months. He told me he and his son had been going back to their house to get some belongings when a mine went off under them, killing the son and injuring the old man. The old man buried his son, then crawled to the hospital. More

Have you ever tried to explain 'In Kind' contributions to citizens of the former Soviet Union? They have absolutely no concept, and in spite of every explanation I could come up with, I felt they ended up feeling that somebody, somewhere (they suspect Archil) was using the money for their own personal benefit. More

At night we went to dinner at the head of preventive medicine. The places they live are interesting: outside they are cold, forbidding, undecorated buildings that are not unlike our slum housing projects. The stairways are unlit, cement. But open the iron or steel door that barricades each one of them, and inside is a warm large lovely apartment with awesome antique furniture, many pictures and Persian rugs, and every one has inlaid parquet floors. More

At about 6 p.m. we went to one of the domestic airports (Vnukovo Airport) for an Aeroflot flight of about two and one-half hours to Tbilisi. ...... We were taken out to the plane, a three-engine jet that resembles a 737. There were 300 seats on the plane; there were about 310 people and a dog who got on. .... a cabin that approached 109°...... Seat belts are never used .....More